Free Image Editors

Online Resources Available to You

Here is a list of tools you can easily learn to use yourself that are freely available for download. You can use tools to edit your camera or mobile images and optimise them for the web!

Images

Great graphics will certainly enhance your articles, your social media channels or events you wish to promote. However, sometimes the mobile or digital camera doesn’t turn out as good as you would like. Maybe there was poor lighting, or the colours were too intense or even look a bit grey. Your high resolution images are massive files and the web is only 72 dpi (dots-per-inch). So, you’ll need to find a way of reducing the size of your images too.

Image Editing

You can always choose to use a graphic program to fix your photos. You’ll be able to adjust the colours, brightness, contrast and many more functions. If you don’t want to subscribe or payout for the likes of Adobe Photoshop then there are free alternatives like GIMP. GIMP is an open-source image manipulation software program giving you some great editing facilities.

GIMP has many features, and some great ‘auto’ features – Take a look below at how the automatic colouring and contrast was fixed in the second photo.

Original

Automatic Levels applied

Image Optimisation

If your image size is more than 1MB then it will take time to download in your browser. Worse, it will take time for your visitors to view it and they will not be hanging around. So, reduce the size of your images in GIMP. Use the Image / Scale Image feature. You can reduce the scale of images by pixel or by percentage. Then SAVE for Web will allow the image to be scaled down to 72dpi for web-optimised viewing.

Automatic Image Compression Tools for WordPress

If you have a large media library within WordPress that contains large images and the job to reduce their size is big, consider using a WordPress plugin to do this automatically.

Smush Image Compression and Optimization is a plugin that can be installed easily within WordPress that will allow you to batch compress your images. The free version will give you control of reducing the size of the images and the paid version offers a greater level of image compression.

Online Tools for Image Compression

If you are not interested in learning to use an image editor or even using a WordPress plugin then there is another alternative – A browser-based tool for real-time compression. Online generators will allow you to upload files, compress them and then download them. For some, this may be an easier alternative.